All posts tagged Pershing Square

Activist hedge fund manager William Ackman reported no stake in Hawaiian commercial property firm Alexander & Baldwin Inc., but hasn’t made public any other big moves.

Reuters

His fund, Pershing Square Capital Management L.P., said in a securities filing on Thursday that it had omitted confidential information from its quarterly holdings disclosure, reporting it separately to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In December, he launched a public campaign against the nutritional supplement maker, calling the company a pyramid scheme and disclosing he had shorted more than 20 million of Herbalife shares, about $1 billion at the time.

Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management has 21.8 million shares of Procter & Gamble Co. and call options on an additional 8.3 million shares, and has sold its entire investment in Kraft Foods, according to a regulatory filing. Mr. Ackman held more than 15 million shares of Kraft at the end of the first quarter. The changes in fund holdings were disclosed Tuesday in a 13F filing, where investment managers with more than $100 million in assets report their equity stakes on a quarterly basis. At P&G’s current share price of $66.73, Mr. Ackman’s shareholding was worth about $1.5 billion. The activist hedge-fund manager, which reported $7.6 billion in equity holdings as of June 30, last month revealed a stake in the consumer-goods giant that he called his largest-ever initial investment in a company. He said then the stake was worth about $2 billion.

The chairman of Canadian Pacific Railway, the railroad under activist attack from Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square, says Ackman’s ideas would “put at severe risk” the company’s progress.

Bloomberg News

Bill Ackman

In a long letter, which included pitches of support from several executives at Canadian Pacific clients, Canadian Pacific’s Chairman John E. Cleghorn says the company is making progress already and has signed several commercial agreements with big clients. Cleghorn also reiterated the company’s CEO has the full backing of the board.

“The board believes that Pershing Square’s demand that the company replace its CEO, Fred Green, with Hunter Harrison would put at severe risk the significant forward momentum the company is making on the multi-year plan,” the letter says. “Given that Pershing Square has presented no credible, detailed plan, the approach advocated by Pershing Square and its nominees, none of whom has any operational experience with Class I railroads, risks moving CP in the opposite direction. It is exactly the wrong thing to do at exactly the wrong time.”

Ackman, head of Pershing Square Capital Management L.P., owns 14.2% of Canadian Pacific and wants to replace current Canadian Pacific Chief Executive Fred Green with Hunter Harrison. Harrison turned Canadian Pacific’s main rival, Canadian National Railway, into an efficiently run railways in North America during his seven-year tenure as chief executive before retiring in 2009. During that time, Canadian Pacific’s operational efficiency and stock-market performance lagged.

The relationship between the two has been fuming since January, with Canadian Pacific hinting that Ackman of delivered “inaccurate” and “mischaracterizing” reports to the media, which Ackman denied strongly.

Activist investor Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management reported Tuesday a new stake in spirits company Beam, but no holdings in home improvement retailer Lowe’s, an investment first reported a quarter earlier.

Pershing Square held 20.8 million shares in Beam as of Dec. 31. The shares would be worth $1.13 billion at the current market price of $54.18 per share.

The investment vehicle is known for holding a concentrated portfolio of just 10 stocks. The portfolio was worth $7.78 billion at the end of December, up 29% from the previous quarter.

Ackman is known for making significant investments in companies and then pushing for asset sales or other strategic changes to boost a company’s value.

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Dealpolitik is Ronald Barusch's strategic look at deals currently making the headlines as well as the major forces at work in the deal-making world. He was a M&A lawyer with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom for over 30 years. He retired in 2010 after 25 years as a partner at the firm. Click here for his current and archived columns.